Flowise

What is Flowise?

Flowise is an open source tool for building LLM-powered apps and AI agents visually. You drag nodes onto a canvas — a model, a prompt, a vector store, tools — wire them together, and get a working chatbot, RAG pipeline, or multi-agent system with an API endpoint and an embeddable chat widget, without hand-writing the orchestration code.

What is Flowise best for?

Teams and developers who want to prototype and ship LLM apps fast without coding every chain by hand. It’s a strong fit for conversational RAG assistants over your own documents, internal AI tools, and quick agent demos — especially when you’d rather see the flow on a canvas than maintain a pile of LangChain glue code.

What can Flowise do?

• Build chatbots, RAG pipelines, and multi-agent flows on a drag-and-drop canvas
• Connect 100+ LLMs, embedding models, and vector databases (OpenAI, Ollama, Chroma, and more)
• Expose any flow as a REST API, or embed it as a chat widget on your site
• Integrate from code with TypeScript and Python SDKs
• Add human-in-the-loop steps and execution tracing for review and debugging
• Self-host with Docker on AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean, Railway, and others

Is Flowise free?

Yes — Flowise is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license, so you can self-host the full platform at no cost and only pay for your own server and model API usage. Flowise Cloud is the managed option: a free tier (2 flows, 100 predictions/month), then Starter at $35/month and Pro at $65/month for higher limits and team features.

Where does Flowise fall short?

• Debugging is basic — large flows get visually cluttered, and you don’t get the node-level traces with timing and token counts that a dedicated observability tool like Langfuse provides.
• It shines at conversational RAG and single-agent chatbots, but complex multi-step workflows, heavy conditional logic, and non-chat use cases push against its limits quickly.
• Scaling to production takes work — you manage your own database, upgrades, and infrastructure, and some governance and enterprise controls sit behind the paid tiers.

What does Flowise replace?

Flowise is a self-hostable alternative to closed conversational-AI builders like Dialogflow: instead of designing intents and bots in a vendor’s cloud, you assemble LLM-native chatbots and agents on your own canvas and infrastructure. It also overlaps with code-first frameworks like LangChain and visual tools like n8n and Botpress, though those are open source rather than paid products.

FAQ

Is Flowise open source? Yes. Flowise is released under the Apache 2.0 license — a permissive OSI-approved license — so the source is public and free to use, modify, and self-host.

Can I self-host Flowise for free? Yes. Self-hosting the open source edition is free; you only pay for the server it runs on and any model API calls. Flowise Cloud is the paid, managed alternative.

Is Flowise a good Dialogflow alternative? For LLM-first chatbots and agents, yes — you get RAG, model choice, and full control over hosting. If you need a turnkey, fully managed contact-center bot, a hosted product may be less setup.

What do I need to run Flowise? Node.js 20 or newer (Docker is the easiest path), plus an LLM provider — either an API key for a hosted model or a local runner like Ollama.